Typographic Treasure Hunt, by Diana Zyliene

This is part of a short little series, talking to some of the Shillington graduates involved in The Design Kids' Threesome exhibition. You can see the finished artworks out and about living life on the streets in Surry Hills for the next few days. Diana Zyliene studied with us part-time and graduated in December 2012. She talks about her experience working with Conway on this project.

I was paired with Manly-based studio Conway and current design student Olivia King. We had four weeks to work on the project. We got together for our first meeting over waffles and a cappuccino, and talked about a three-word phrase we wanted to use for our poster. Where to next. "Where" was given to Conway, "next" to Olivia, and I was given "to". A tricky one to design - just two letters! This first meeting was a chance to talk about how we wanted to present the poster. We decided we wanted to create something 3D so people could touch it - they could have a different experience with it. We were thinking about light, and what the poster would look like at night.

I went away from that meeting and sketched a few pages of ideas. I was inspired by how the posters would be displayed - as a typographic treasure hunt. It made me think of pirates, treasure hunts, secrecy, code. Often you don't see things the way they are - you have to discover them. You know how sometimes at first something looks strange and weird and you can't see it right away, but then you move and you can see it for what it really is. I created a few mockups, glueing aluminium foil onto kitchen paper. I was really inspired by the silver coins and swords that pirates would discover in their treasure chest.

We had a second meeting and I showed Conway and Olivia my mock-ups and they loved it. The tricky part then was finding someone to laser cut aluminium sheet to make the real poster! Luckily I got some help from Conway to find someone to do that.

The final product actually has a lightbox behind it so it lights up at night. The three of us did things with special cutting so we wanted to show that off.

At the beginning I was so excited about getting chosen to be a part of Threesome - only then I started thinking about what was actually involved and I got so nervous! Luckily I had so much support from Conway and it turned out to be a really interesting and inspiring journey. I am really glad I was given this opportunity from The Design Kids!

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